Meeting with a Murderer
by xxxPiratePrincessxxx
Summary: I pushed the sleeve of his shirt back – and froze. It wasn't the puckered, branded 'P' that stopped my breath - It was the tattoo of a sparrow taking flight over a churning sea, the blue ink imprinted on his wrist burned into my mind. One-Shot.


Sand crackled with ozone under my bare feet as I walked along the stretch of deserted beach. Tiny granules, buzzing with compacted electricity, stuck between my toes and clung to my ankles as I scuffed up a dune, and as the moonlight shafted through the heavy midnight air it illuminated the thin white shift I wore, still musty from just waking from my bed. Thick, soft dark waves gathered around my shoulders – pushing it back, I winced as my fingers caught in the snarls of unbrushed mane and I gave up trying to neaten the mess.

I knew how I looked that night – fourteen, tall, brown-eyed with a muddy complexion and too-slim limbs. Knees hunched up to my chest, I gazed listlessly out to the surprisingly calm waves and dreaded the ever passing second when I had to return. There was no unnatural reason why I had wandered out to the coast – I couldn't sleep. The blankets were thin and hot, my head pounding, my mind too buzzed to even concentrate on my scattered thoughts.

Lightning fractured the horizon – light spilled out of the fissure in the wash of ink sky soundlessly, white-red-silver in twin columns flickering like a dying lantern hanging beside the invisible moon. Reaching downward, I traced my mind out on the shore; a destroyed house, a pistol, two faceless stick people that were so familiar, a black, ragged sail.

Thunder crashed through my thoughts and I swept the grooves out of the beach, pressing it flat. I looked up to see a dark shape hurtling from the sea toward me. I screamed.  
I backpedalled immediately – hands and feet becoming confused with each other as I vied to get away, my eyes fixed on the woebegone shape now slumped face-down on the beach. There was a dinghy bobbing on the now angry waves – two men, their faces undistinguishable from the concealment of night, laughed raucously in the boat, thick necks and scarred arms rippling with muscle and wickedly sharp blades strapped to their belts.

A sudden flash of lightning silhouetted a ship waiting nearby, with a sleek hull and decorated Chinese sails. A flag flapped at the mast, tattered edges billowing in the wind. I narrowed my eyes and felt something in my heart seize up. They flew no colours, and a black and red dragon gaped from the fabric. Pirates.

My fingers were suddenly cold, and as I threw my arm up to protect myself at the sudden revelation, sun-browned skin blanched snow white in front of my eyes. The unfortunate victim of these brigands was still comatose in the sand. These men had obviously not seen me – for one, I had been sitting quite far from the tide, near a clutch of shady palm trees, and two they were evidently occupied with their 'business' to notice me in the shadow of the trees.

Memories pulsed through my head – fire, pain, terror, too ill and too young to do anything but watch. All my courage went into dragging myself behind the nearest beached boulder and to sit rooted to the spot whilst all this happened.

I don't know how long they stayed. They came on shore once – I pressed against the cool wall of stone I had taken refuge behind and clenched and unclenched my fingers eight times, focusing totally on my erratic, hurried breathing. I know how long I did that for. Too long. When I had finally plucked up the courage to peer around the rock, the ship anchored on the restless ocean was long gone.

I crawled rather than walked over to the unconscious man they had thrown onto the shore – the yellow grain was comforting beneath my palms, sifting beneath the whorls and spools of my fingertips. He was an interesting creature, from what I could see; dreadlocks, matted and long but not necessarily dirty, sea-salt crusted under his nails (which were surprisingly well-kept) and the clothes of a typical dandy, with a poet's shirt and a unbuttoned great-coat, and leather boots with worn down heels well-used to pacing on a deck. A sailor of some sort, surely.

He lay with his face completely submerged, flat on his front, his back to me. There was a red bandanna wrapped around the flat dome of his skull, and as I looked closer I realised something darker trickled lazily from the edge of the cloth. Reaching apprehensively forward, I rolled him over, noticing the lean muscle beneath my hands. His face turned upward towards me, and something nudged me inside, like a distant memory.

The bone structure beneath the tanned, taut skin was feminine, with sloping cheekbones like slashes in his narrow cheeks and a subtle, defined jaw, with a calm brow that was marked with experience. He had smooth lips and bristles of black hair bordering his curious mouth, and a goatee that was twined with bright beads, much like his dreadlocks, intertwined with trinkets and strange objects. His eyebrows were straight above his shut eyes, which I could see from the smudge under his long lashes, were lined with kohl. He could be no older than four and thirty.

There was no physical damage to his appearance, apart from a few healed scars, which were commonplace for men of the sea. My gaze travelled from his face to his temple, where he had taken a severe blow. A cut, maybe two or three centimetres long, leaped across his sweating forehead, swollen and angry-looking and bruised badly around the edges. Blood still welled in the gash, staining the muted scarf he wore scarlet in the starlight. Pity swelled in my chest at the white pallor of his golden skin and the feverish temperature burning under my hand when I brushed a braid away from the wound.

I thought briefly of taking him to the town doctor, then dismissed it immediately, the thought of a not-even fifteen year old girl dragging a fully-grown man through the gossiping streets hardly an option.

Lifting his arm, I pushed the cream sleeve of his shirt back – and froze. It wasn't the puckered, branded 'P' that stopped my breath, or the numerous scars criss-crossing his strong forearm. It was the tattoo of a sparrow taking flight over a churning sea, the blue ink imprinted on his wrist burned into my mind.

_A man, tall and fierce, striding through the splintered doorway, followed by the monster with the plumed hat, laughing at my poor father rushing toward him, lifting a pistol with barely a blink and shooting him through the head. Unable to scream, a fit wracking my small body as I shivered uncontrollably in my hiding place, my eyes fixed on the hand of my dear papa's murderer, with the cuff of his sleeve falling back and the picture of a bird tattooed on his wrist._

I moved back slowly; sound roaring in my ears on this silent beach.

_My mother dragged by his crew men past the cupboard she had bundled me in, her fierce struggles too much of a bother; another gunshot and she fell beside my father, her head slamming on the floorboards and rolling to face me with glassy, dead eyes._

Him. Him. Him.

Finally finding my strength; wrenching open the trap door in the floor of the wardrobe that my parents had no time to flee to, sobbing uncontrollably as I fumbled my way through darkness, sick with fever and seven years old as pirates of the Black Pearl pillaged my beloved village above.

And now, here he was. The forefront of the siege against my town, the captain and murderer of my parents, the plague of my nightmares since I was found, wailing and alone, by the elders of the next town, having emerged from the trapdoor at the edge of the forest.

I looked at the wound at his temple. The edges were swollen with pus, the skin around near-black. I had been raised in a household of mistreated servants; I knew the outcome of severe head injuries. Unless treated immediately – there was practically no hope.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I should've walked away, left this destroyer of my childhood to death's mercy and had no trouble on my mind for my deed. An eye for an eye. It was this that ran through my head, throbbing in my veins, willing my legs to spin on my heel and walk briskly away. But I didn't. My conscience raged against this vengeance, screaming at me to save this murderer before it was too late and his ghost haunted my bedside.

For one moment, the logical, cold-blooded side of me almost turned my body and marched me away. But then, out of nowhere, my mother's voice rose in my head. A memory – six years old, with a dog that had bitten me before lying on its side, dazed from when a boy had thrown a stone at its head. I thought of the carriage I knew would come in a few minutes, and how the dog would surely get crushed.  
Then a gentle hand rested on my shoulder, and I gazed up into the face of my mother, her soft smile understanding and her beautiful eyes shining with reason.

"Are you going to stand there, darling?" she questioned. Her slender fingers gripped my shoulder a little harder. "You can't catch goodness by standing still." I looked at the dog again. Its fur was ruffled by a breeze, and its eyes were closed in pain. Three seconds later, I had ran into the street, lifted the terrier up, then returned to my mother and placed the little dog out of harms way on a nearby doorstep. For some reason, I remember crying afterwards. My mother had kissed my hair and given me a single sovereign to dry my tears.

Her words returned to me now, and they seemed to chastise me as I stood mutely, staring at the pirate. _You can't catch goodness by standing still._

I knelt beside him and lifted his head carefully into my lap._ For you, Mamma._

I started by tearing a strip off my nightgown and soaking it in seawater. The salt would sting, but it would clean the blood and sterilize the cut. I took the linen and rubbed the rag across his forehead, cleaning away the fluid and dirt from the wound. He moaned in his sleep, and I stroked my thumb across his knuckles in comfort, trying my best to be as gentle as I could. I then removed his coat, boots and bandanna, to keep the temperature of his hot body down.

Now was the hard part. It would hurt him, but probably not wake him as he was so deeply unconscious. Trying not to think too much about what I was doing, I tore off some more strips of my rapidly-shortening shift and saturated them in water. I held him firmly in my arms, then, taking a deep breath, I placed my wet fingertips around the welt and squeezed. He bucked slightly and writhed in pain, hissing through his teeth as I mopped and mopped the mixture of yellow pus and blood streaming from his cut with the linen strips, instinctually clasping him closer and soothing him with soft, pleading words, the hand I didn't use to wipe away the fluid running again and again through his hair and flitting from head  
to his chest, moving in large circles over his heaving torso.

Perspiration beaded both of our brows as I removed the last of the discharge and wrapped a clean, dry piece of gown around the affected area as a make-shift bandage. When I had finished tying the bandage, I threw my arms around his shoulders and held him close, our hearts thudding together and both breathing rapidly.

When I could think clearly again, I removed my body haltingly from his still one. Opening my eyes, it took a while for me to focus and see that his eyes were also open. My hands still supported his upper body as we gazed silently at each other, his irises surprisingly beautiful – burnt ocher, shot through with amber. He lifted his hand and placed it deliberately on my arm, which was across his chest, opening his mouth as if to say something. Then his eyes flickered with fatigue and his head lolled back, falling back into a sleep that would now be untroubled by his injury.

There was a tenderness that I had never felt before in the way I carefully placed him back on the sand, arranged his clothes beside him, and drew him away from the rolling tide and under the protection of the bowing palm trees. I walked back to my home, the house of an elder that had adopted me that fateful night, as if in a dream, and had fallen asleep in a gown that I had torn to my knees in a slumber that was frequented by a pair of haunting hazel eyes.

**Now where did that come frooooooom?**

**Well, there was a competition on DeviantArt where you had to imagine a scenario where you could either save or betray Jack Sparrow, using art or literature. So half way through this, I realised that it was about the mutiny on the Black Pearl, but the administrator said she'd accept this so here this is :D**

**Go figure. **

**xPPx**


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